1. Technical Field
This invention relates to a service delivery platform that supports many devices to access many services and more particularly, to a pluggable service delivery platform in which many devices and many services are pluggable.
2. Description of Related Art
Nowadays there are numerous pervasive computing devices such as handheld PCs, smartphone, mobile phone screenphone, pager, fax machine, etc. They all have computing power and people wish to use these existing devices to access the network and do e-business. But there also exists challenges, since current network infrastructure is designed for the personal computer (“PC”). At the same time different services have different features. Thus, some effort is needed to connect a new device to the network, if the backend system is changed, e.g., if some new service is added, the application on the device must be changed (or added); similar effort is needed to change the logic of backend services when new devices roll out. With the rapid development of network computing, there is a need for a pluggable service delivery platform that can support many devices and many services in a flexible and scalable way.
Some companies have designed some platforms for supporting many devices to access many services, but these platforms are designed specifically for some devices and services and there is no flexible way to plug a new kind of device or a new type of service into the platform.